Word: northrops
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...Benefits of Fallout. Conspicuously missing from the list of prime contract bidders on Project Apollo is Tom Jones's Northrop Corp. But no matter who wins it, Northrop stands to pick up fat sub contracts...
This happy state of affairs is the consequence of the novel notions that Jones began to urge on Northrop almost from the day he joined the company. Within months after he was hired, Jones was invited by Northrop's late President Whitley Collins to help him reshape Northrop's whole way of doing business. Characteristically, scholarly Tom Jones began by combing through innumerable speeches by top U.S. Government officials, and detected a subtle but profound change in defense spending policy. Says Jones: "We came to the conclusion-it seems simple now, but remember that was the mid-1950s...
Even then, Jones foresaw sharply increased Pentagon pressure for higher performance, and sharply increased competition among companies for the defense dollar. How could relatively small Northrop prosper? One answer, Jones concluded, was to concentrate on making selected parts rather than entire systems: "Whatever we could do exceedingly well, we would exploit; whatever we were second best in, we would drop...
Operating on the Jones philosophy, Northrop had to make some harsh choices. It scrapped a program to build a costly Mach 3 interceptor, elected instead to develop a bargain-basement ($550,000) jet trainer. "Some people thought we were damned fools, because the Air Force was planning to buy 500 of these interceptors at $5,000,000 apiece," recalls Jones. "But it was clear to me that there were some tough decisions ahead that the Defense Department hadn't owned up to. With money being poured into long-range missiles, a program for a long-range fighter-interceptor looked...
Before long, the Pentagon proved Jones right by scrubbing the fighter-interceptor program. By contrast, Northrop's backlog for its supersonic T-38 Talon trainer now stands at $101 million...